Dougherty isn’t quite sure whether to wow us with the hulking immensity of the action scenes or to wag his finger at us for the environmental hubris of our species.

Egerton is busy and fizzy in the leading role, but there’s a curious blankness in his impersonation, and a shortage of charm. Hard to tell whether viewers will flock to him as they did to Rami Malek, who gave such electric life to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Yet Rocketman is the better film. Not by much, but just enough.

Yet Ritchie has made significant alterations. First, he has modified the law of sultanic succession by giving women the right to rule. Second, by some cunning spell, he has taken all the fun from the earlier Disney film and — abracadabra! — made it disappear. The big musical numbers strain for pizzazz. The action sequences are a confounding rush.

The film grows into a caustic comedy, rife with fidgety questions.

Wilde is unerringly focussed on her heroines, and on their fundamental right to get things wrong.

Brilliant melodramatic flourishes adorn the blank center of this passionate fable.

Why do people keep making films about writers?

No, what’s dismaying about All Is True is that it plays so slow and loose.

Its mighty ambition and mighty power are suggested by its unusual length (it runs nearly four hours) and its distinctive, original style and tone. Yet it’s rooted in a familiar kind of story, a tale of the sort that lesser filmmakers could easily dramatize in familiar ways but which Hu expanded into a vision of life.

Despite situations aching for parody, Assayas is anything but satirical: as his characters give the book business, the Internet, and infidelity a vigorous but empty dialectical workout, he comes down squarely on the side of business as usual, which the film itself embodies. Yet Macaigne, quizzical and impulsive, invests a rote role with brilliant turns.

Historians of the period will learn nothing new from the movie, yet it remains a stirring enterprise, especially when it peers back, beyond the bright public record of Gorbachev’s heyday, into the mist of what feels like a distant past.

You could argue that such silly satisfaction comes with the territory, but although I enjoyed the snap of Long Shot, I couldn’t help remembering how “Roman Holiday” (1953) — another film about a lowly journalist who falls for a higher being — draws to its wrenching close.

Structurally, the film is all chop and change, with Hare and Fiennes tacking back and forth across Nureyev’s early years. Some viewers will find the result too fussy by half; I liked its restlessness, and the sense of a chafed and driven spirit that refuses to be boxed in.

The one thing you do need to know about Avengers: Endgame is that it runs for a little over three hours, and that you can easily duck out during the middle hour, do some shopping, and slip back into your seat for the climax. You won’t have missed a thing.

Birdman trades on facile, casual dichotomies of theatre versus cinema and art versus commerce. It’s a white elephant of a movie that conceals a mouse of timid wisdom, a mighty and churning machine of virtuosity that delivers a work of utterly familiar and unoriginal drama.

Garrone’s forte, as ever, is to layer the brutish with the beautiful, and to find grace in dereliction.

Budreau’s movie, entertaining as it is, leaves us little the wiser. Maybe it was a job for Bergman, after all.

With extraordinary material, a merely ordinary approach is worse than a bore; it’s a betrayal.

The problem is, there’s only just enough story to go round. You can hear the creak as both characters and subplots get jacked up out of proportion.

Denis delves into the group psychology of a beleaguered crew, housed in an interplanetary rust bucket. Her devotees will claim, correctly, that her movie blooms with provocative ideas.

The best parts of the new film, by a long stretch, are the flying sequences, in which Dumbo wheels around inside the tent. Sometimes he even has a jockey, in the daring shape of Colette (Eva Green), the in-house trapeze artist. Elsewhere, however, we are dragged through patches of glum and listless drama.

In short, the pursuit of pleasure is not confined to our hero alone but extended to all comers, with a horny democratic good will, and it’s typical of Korine to suggest that, in an era as acrimonious as ours, the true provocation is to harbor no grudges, to forgive us our trespasses, and to drift along, catching the tide of contentment.

If Roll Red Roll feels raw and pressing, six and a half years after the event, that’s because it is set on one of the world’s most contested borders: the place where online justice meets, and chafes against, the due process of the law. Expect worse battles to come.

Us is political filmmaking of the most spirited sort, and it sets up quite a fight: the Hydes come to visit the Jekylls, and the Jekylls hit back. Whom you cheer for, in the long run, is up to you.

All that we treasure in Jia is there in Zhao’s scrutinizing gaze, at once pointed and guarded, and in the fierce patience with which she deliberates before taking action.

Is it any surprise that this disturbing brand of cinema was triggered by 9/11, a catastrophe that, despite the valor it called forth, and the wars that ensued, lies beyond redemption and revenge? Or that Hotel Mumbai, a well-staged model of the form, should leave you feeling fidgety and low? You can admire a film, reel at the horrors it unfolds, and still wind up asking yourself, helplessly, what it was all for.

On the other hand, we have Brie Larson, who is by far the best reason to see the movie. If we ignore “Elektra” (2005), which isn’t hard to do, this is the first film to be fronted by a woman in the male-infested galaxy of Marvel—quite a burden for Larson, who shoulders it with ease, executing her duties, not to mention her opponents, with resourcefulness and wit.

With special effects of a startling simplicity—the filmmakers launch the action into cosmic realms.

If you lack a taste for such hokum, Greta is still worth seeing, for the sake of Isabelle Huppert: an A-grade performer, by any standard, as shown in the rigors of “The Piano Teacher” (2001) and the vengeful perversity of “Elle” (2016).

The story of Gloria Bell, to be honest, is stretched a little thin. For the millionth time, the female of the species is let down by the male, and that’s that. The genius of Moore, though, is how plausibly, and how patiently, she fills the spaces of ordinary living.

Sitting through Transit is like watching an anti-“Casablanca,” so diligent is Petzold in the draining of romantic hopes, and there were times when I dreamed that Claude Rains would stroll in and order a champagne cocktail. What sustains this highly unusual film, and lends it an ominous momentum, is the figure of Rogowski, as Georg.

The Iron Orchard, though geographically confined, is all over the place. We flit past the patches of Jim’s life that matter (what happened during those two years, as the dollars poured in?) and linger on those that don’t. Random flashbacks alert us to his youth. The musical score is overcooked, the cast underpowered, and the dialogue something of a mishmash.

Seeing, in Simon’s documentary, the directing candidates forced to analyze a scene, submit a dossier, step on a set and direct a dictated scene, is like watching the training of hired hands rather than original artists—people better suited to writing grant applications than scripts, better suited to following orders than creating new worlds, to playing the urbane part of a director in meetings and interviews than actually being one.

The brisk and lyrical action, filmed in chilly black-and-white tones, is adorned with eccentric, symbolic details; the petty stuff of daily life shudders with stifled conflict and looming calamity.

The cultural richness of Birds of Passage is overwhelming, its sense of detail piercingly perceptive, and its sense of drama rigorously yet organically integrated with its documentary elements. Fusing the sociopolitical, the natural, and the mythopoetic realms, the movie offers a model to filmmakers anywhere regarding the dramatic power that inheres in the cultural specifics of any story.

The character of Hugo is written and directed with an aw-shucksiness that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Mickey Rooney musical, and his romance with Alita has a simple and absolute purity that’s as sentimentally drubbing as it is devoid of substance.

Lavishly detailed yet dramatically vague, opulently produced but blandly depicted.

Viewers reared on The Lego Movie will find plenty to nourish them anew. The songs are still peppy. The principal voices are still supplied by Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, and Will Arnett. And real, non-animated kids are still shown, now and then, sporting with their Lego creations.

Yet the movie is not to be skipped. You should sample its mixture of bacchanal and gall, and revel in Farhadi’s dependable deftness, as he sketches and frames his collection of characters.

Stately rather than stealthy, is no match for it, but you are borne along, nonetheless, by the clash of characters, and by the ironies of historical momentum.

You find yourself gradually engulfed, as if by rising waters, and it seems only fair to report that The Wild Pear Tree lasts for more than three hours.

Whatever they pay these movie stars to keep a straight face, it’s not enough.

In short, it’s up to Curtis to rescue the film. She’s meant to be the villain, but her lines, even the motley ones (“The stars aligned, we slayed the dragon, and we won”), are delivered with such a delectable thwack that I kept forgetting to boo.

You have to admire Shyamalan’s efforts to deconstruct a genre that he evidently loves, yet there is just so little to haunt or to fool us in the result, and a few sharp laughs might have helped his cause.

The film is at the same time intensely personal and riddled with occasionally cringe-inducing clichés. No matter: Rockaway is an agonized and sharply moving film.

It’s when Landais departs from the original, or has a bright idea for expanding on it, that the movie’s troubles begin.

What is fascinating, and valuable, about The American Meme is its ability to reveal the desperation, loneliness, and sheer Sisyphean tedium of ceaselessly chasing what will most likely end up being an ever-diminishing share of the online-attention economy.

If you’re slow, like me, and find yourself bemused by the chronology, don’t worry; your reward will be a topnotch twist toward the end. By rights, that should make you want to watch the movie all over again, in order to sort out what belongs where, except that everything about it is so scummy—even the sight of creamer being stirred into coffee makes you gag—that a second viewing would feel like the grimmest of grinds. Destroyer is a thriller, but only just.

The film depends, in other words, on its stars. Both, you can tell, have studied their respective masters with scrupulous care, and the results of their pupillage are plain to see.

In short, those of us who pursue Mariolatry — the worship of all things Poppins — are free to delight in this film. Indeed, it shifts a little nearer than its predecessor did to the spiky, peppery briskness of Travers’s tales, and the whole enterprise exhales, as it should, an air of the politely mad.

Widows, in other words, is a merger — of silliness and perspicacity, of conspiratorial gloom and surprising violence. (Even those who wield it can be taken aback.) So strong is the cast that it carries us over the gaps in the movie’s logic.

Roma is persuasive in its beauty. It wins you over. The face of Aparicio, in the leading role, is not placidly resigned but serene in its stoicism, and if she is less a participant than a bystander during the major convulsions of the era, well, few of us can claim to be much more.

This interfamily clash, fizzing with one-upmanship, is the highlight of the film, and that’s the problem. The planets of the plot, as it were, are more exciting than the sun around which they revolve.

Personally, I reckon that Portman tips Vox Lux off balance. The simple act of drinking through a straw is turned into an embarrassing megaslurp.

Only some on-the-nose symbols and facile political sentiments diminish her majestically playful, fiercely empathetic vision.

The overarching and underlying question that the film poses is nothing less than: What is art? And, for that matter, is the conventional definition of good art too narrow to account for the merits of such works as these?

The secrets unveiled in the movie’s second half are mostly wretched, and Kore-eda, in his steady and unhectoring way, is levelling grave accusations at Japanese social norms, yet what stays with you, unforgettably, is that bundle of mixed souls at the start.

The good news about the new film from Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite, is that you are likely to emerge from it in good humor — bemused, or amused, or a mixture of the two.

It’s a calculatedly heartwarming and good-humored look at atrocious actions, ideas, and attitudes with a pallid glow of halcyon optimism, a view of a change of heart that’s achieved through colossal exertions and confrontations with danger.

This dramatization of the last stages of Vincent van Gogh’s life, directed by Julian Schnabel and starring Willem Dafoe as the ill-fated genius, lurches between the ridiculous and the sublime.

The realization of her life online, as she interacts with a profusion of screens and windows, is extraordinarily complex and detailed, but the drama is thin and predictable; despite the quasi-documentary authenticity of the details of Alice’s work, the movie offers more prowess than perspective.

It’s a mixed bunch, often flimsy, with deliberate lurches of tone, and the Coens, as ever, are unable (or unwilling) to decide whether barbarous bloodshed is something to be flinched from or cackled at. Yet I came away haunted by a scattering of sights and sounds.

The film puts his work convincingly and revealingly into the context of his turbulent life and the passionate politics of the times. Above all, however, the movie puts on display Winogrand’s singular way of working—and proves that, as with many of the artistic luminaries of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, his process is as original a creation as his art, and is inseparable from it.

Porumboiu cinematically constructs—both through the patient, subtly but decisively shaped interviews and the cannily gradual editing—a life story that engages, at crucial points of contact, with the political history of his times and that reflects aspirations and inspirations that are themselves of a historic power.

Among the Scots, look out for James Douglas (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the bellow of whose triumphal rage is at once thrilling and scarcely human. For a few seconds, we forget that we are watching a well-mounted period drama about a minor regional conflict; a blood-thirst as basic as this feels horribly timeless.

Given the upheavals of the past two years, along the fault line between electoral and sexual politics, Reitman could have told the sorry saga from Rice’s point of view — her brush with fame, and her demonization as a temptress, or worse, at the hands of the media. Why must the fall of man, rather than the survival of woman, still be the main event? Can’t we have the business without the monkeys?

Personally, for that reason, I would have lopped off the final scene, which I simply didn’t believe in, and which, if anything, resolves too much. A movie as cryptic as “Burning” deserves to hang fire.

The later sections of the story, dealing with Mercury’s AIDS diagnosis, are carefully handled, but most of the film is stuffed with lumps of cheesy rock-speak (“We’re just not thinking big enough”; “I won’t compromise my vision”), and gives off the delicious aroma of parody.

The Guilty is smartly constructed and tautened with regular twists, but, if it were merely clever, it wouldn’t test your nerves as it does. Its view of human error is rarely less than abrasive, and most of the adult characters, visible and invisible, are enmeshed in a hell of good intentions.

The first time I saw Guadagnino’s Suspiria, I came out pretty much covered in gore, and confounded by the surfeit of stories. Can a splash be so big that it drowns the senses? How does such a film cohere? The second time around, I followed the flow, and found that what it led to was not terror, or disgust, but an unexpected sadness.

It is a fiercely composed, historically informed, and richly textured film, as insightful regarding the particularities of the protagonist as it is on the artistic life — and on the life of its times.

The movie is constructed entirely of a remarkable array of archival footage, including Beckermann’s recordings, that spotlights unresolved national traumas and unabated anti-Semitism.

I prefer Wildlife when it gets messier, as Mulligan casts aside her natural sweetness to bring us a soured soul, driven only by the courage of her confusion. So rank is the unhappiness that you can almost smell the bitter smoke of the fires, drifting from far away.

The Halloween of today is slick and sick, but little is left of that sleep-destroying dread. Still, not all is lost, because the Bogeyman, bless him, has not forgotten his manners. For old times’ sake, he gets to sit up straight.

Skillful and compelling this film may be, but, if Neil Armstrong had been the sort of fellow who was likely to cry on the moon, he wouldn’t have been the first man chosen to go there. He would have been the last.

The Old Man & the Gun is as much of a fantasy as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Yet you buy into the geniality of Lowery’s movie, nourished as it is by the entire cast.

The result is pure Saturday-night moviegoing: it gives you one hell of a wallop, then you wake up on Sunday morning without a scratch. (By contrast, the emotional nakedness of the Judy Garland version, poised within formal compositions, can still reduce me to rubble.)

Knightley and West leap without a qualm into these excesses, not least the Feydeau-like saga of a flame-haired Louisiana heiress (Eleanor Tomlinson), who sleeps with both Willy and his wife, unbeknownst to her, though he beknew everything.

The film will neither change minds nor soothe embittered hearts, I fear, and an opportunity has been missed.

The narrative staggers on, enlivened only by the hovering threat of kitsch and the musical dubbing. Moore, like an upmarket version of Lina Lamont, in “Singin’ in the Rain,” lip-synchs convincingly to the sound of Renée Fleming. But not quite convincingly enough.

There's another reason for the lure of The Sisters Brothers. If the lives that it portrays are in transit, the world that encircles them is in even faster flux.

Southside with You, running a brisk hour and twenty minutes, is a fully realized, intricately imagined, warmhearted, sharp-witted, and perceptive drama, one that sticks close to its protagonists while resonating quietly but grandly with the sweep of a historical epic.

With microcosms of microcosms and reflections of reflections, Greene offers a passionately ambitious, patiently empathetic mapping of modern times.

It’s worth seeing precisely for the heat of the arguments that you can enjoy after the screening and, above all, for Emma Thompson.

Nyoni’s frank, confrontational style is both derisive and empathetic; she extracts powerful symbolic images from the oppressive environment.

For regular moviegoers, The Apparition will seem most remarkable for what it is not. So accustomed are we to yarns of demonic possession that the beatific equivalent comes as quite a shock.

What Hawke has provided here, with plenty of grace and a minimum of fuss, is an elegy for a life that went missing, more smolder than blaze, and a chance to hear the songs of the unsung.

The shaded black-and-white cinematography and the dialectical romances mimic the styles and moods of nineteen-seventies French classics without their intimacy, rage, or historical scope.

Despite clichéd depictions of Nazi atrocities, the movie persuasively evokes, with its wealth of details, the slender threads on which historical events—and historical truth—depend.

What lingers, when this movie is done, are not the regular rallies, during which we survey the whole court, but those moments when we focus on McEnroe alone — on the dancing shuffle of his feet as he bobs and races for a return. Swap the sneakers for tap shoes and the dusty clay for a mirrored floor, and we could be watching Fred without Ginger, lost in the delirium of his art.

It’s more than the portrait of an artist (or even of two); it’s a revelation and exaltation of the artistic essence, of the very nature of an artist’s life as an unending act of creation in itself.

This takeoff on the children's-book series refreshingly balances sweet and bitter tones; Pooh's innocence irritates Christopher before it redeems him, and Madeline undertakes a bold adventure to gain her father's attention.

Minding the Gap is a personal documentary of the highest sort, in which the film’s necessity to the filmmaker—and its obstacles, its resistances, its emotional and moral demands on him—are part of its very existence.

The vigorous cast enlivens the conventional action, and brilliant comedic sallies by Awkwafina, as Rachel’s college friend, and Nico Santos, as Nick’s cousin, knock it for a loop.

Lee would contend, I guess, that the sober approach will no longer suffice — that the age we inhabit is too drunk on its own craziness. He has a point.

Decker pushes the action to the breaking point of fury, which the cast—and especially Howard, in one of the most accomplished teen performances ever—embodies with a flaying and self-scourging vulnerability.

The director, Desiree Akhavan, who wrote the script with Cecilia Frugiuele (adapting a novel by Emily M. Danforth), expresses and elicits apt outrage, but the action is schematic and the characters are thinly sketched.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film. Yet the play of emotions on Macdonald’s face tells of worries and wounds much deeper than anything that can be accounted for in the script, and it will take more than a jigsaw, I reckon, even a thousand-piece whopper, to free this woman’s soul.